Systemic Risk
by LuciThor
Summary: Dean heads the surgical operations unit for Operation STEM, a covert program administered by The Men of Letters that uses brain washing to control America's stock market. Kept hidden under Kansas's streets since World War II, Dean's dystopian empire is threatened when he kidnaps Castiel, the leader of a rebellion against STEM kept secret for 70 years**STORY HAS MOVED TO ARCHIVE**


Chapter 1

**_Underground of Topeka, Kansas, Fall 2015_**

Time.  
Pernicious…Unrelenting…Merciless.  
Yet trite; stale, like nature as it shrivels into itself.  
Rock to sand; fire to ash.  
Nature too faces the burden of time as it rots away for the world to abuse, acting like a pulse on life support. I suppose that some would see life support as a sign of hope; beauty. Others see it as a plague of unending misery, beckoning them to stay dormant on this earth until the plug is pulled.  
And in the world we live in—the world my grandfather helped fuck up—only "we happy few" get to pull the plug.

"This New Ager ready?" Gabriel startled me with his inquiry, causing me to lurch forward slightly with nerves across the cramped concrete floor of the containment center. "Were you lost in your pretentious inner monologue again?"

"Yeah. Fuck. I think I was even quoting Shakespeare for a bit there." I did not realize how lost I had become in my own grandiose ramblings about the state of the world until very recently. Luckily, Gabriel was always there to take me out of them before I started listening to my own bullshit. I didn't have time to create a place in my mind where I could pretend that I was above all of _this_. I couldn't create a cocoon where I could remain secure, observing each and every little thing that had brought me to this point in front of…who was it this week…oh yes, Chuck Shurley.

Chuck was yet another example of what we here in the Psychosociological and Medicinal Research Unit of STEM called a "New Ager." They were the unhappy few who came into this world with this perturbed, displaced notion that they had access to the admirable, rather profound ideal of "free will." Each month, a few of these unfortunate souls would slip onto our radar with word that they were conspiring against our covert underground fraternity that had been carefully assembled since the dawn of World War II. In order to keep ourselves hidden, we took to stealing the sons of bitches in the middle of night like a corny vaudeville villain, only to escort them down to our containment center and check them off on Santa's list of luckily children fortunate enough to receive the gift of a memory wipe for Christmas.

Chuck was the latest victim. A tech wiz, the geek had devised a website on the deep web that attempted to compile what exactly it was that the Men of Letters did with their coveted STEM operation within the underground of Topeka, Kansas. He had some good sources, too. He even got the exact date that my brother, Sam Winchester's, special operations department handed over the CEO of Goldman Sachs to Gabriel and me. The number we did on that bastard…the American economy still hasn't recovered. However, Chuck was really no match for Charlie Bradbury. Give her a sleepless night and a box of pop tarts and she can trace anybody—even a rat hiding under some serious ghost proxies and a network of re-routed IP addresses.

I wasn't always proud of the work I did. I wasn't lying when I said that my grandfather, Henry, fucked up the world. But, what else was there for me to do but bash in some skulls, brainwash some freethinkers and world leaders into submission, and control the entire American economy? Really, on paper, it was a good gig.

But there were some days—like this one—where this job was tough. I could hear Chuck in the containment compartment banging on the walls and shrieking for help. He was held in a small white room, no bigger than a broom closet, sealed by a black metal door. The door was rusted and rotted from the constant leak of Topeka's sewage pipes. The room was surrounded by a swell of concrete with a single drain in the middle of the floor to keep the joint from flooding. See, unlike Sam's lofty special ops department and the stately walnut walls of the infamous financial analytics unit, my unit was caged below the Men of Letters' compound in the recesses of the mid-western city.

Chuck—besides the obvious agenda to oust our secret little club—was a good man. He had a wife named Magdalene, two kids, probably a golden retriever. He was bound by morals I could never live up to, nor that I could afford to abide by. He was a fighter. And Gabriel and I had him locked up like a monster howling in tiring agony to enclosed white walls.

"Dean, it's been more than 24 hours," Gabriel said to me. He handed me a scalpel—my best friend, so it would seem—and patted me on the back. He knew I wasn't in the mood to systemize this one. Gabriel was probably the only other operator in STEM besides Sam who understood this constant battle between the life we were meant to lead and the moral obligation to drop the scalpel, help the poor man out of the containment compartment, and let me him go back to his kids and wife. But that wasn't our life. That sure as hell wasn't our world.

I sighed, grasping Gabriel's shoulder. "I can keep time, Gabes. Thanks." Gabriel smiled. "Then, let's systemize this bitch, buck-o."

I reached into my pocket for my cell phone. I had to call Sam. I would need his team to carry Chuck out into the operation unit while Gabriel and I prepped for surgery. Before I could dial my brother's extension, however, Raphael—everybody's least favorite surgical assistant—waltzed into the containment center holding a banged up metal fold-out chair. The chair made ungodly clanging noises as he placed it in the middle of the containment center in front of the door, a Miller in one hand, and a copy of the latest Penthouse in the other. The sizzling sound of the beer can echoed across the desolate room as he cracked it open. He placed the can to his lips, taking an obnoxiously loud gulp of beer before spatting it out onto the concrete.

"This is disgusting. I'm telling you, we see all the blood, we deal with all the screaming and the whining and the gore and what do we get? Warm fucking beer? We have half the country's wealth and we have warm beer? Does this make sense?"

Gabriel glared at Raphael, clearly attempting not to just strangle the bitch. If anybody could care less about the temperature of beer at this very moment, it was Gabriel. "Then why don't you go complain to Mich—"

"Don't speak his name in front of me, Gabe. Never speak his name in front of me."

"Oh, everybody's hatred for the big man in charge. Get the fuck over it! Do you even understand the severity of this occupation? What—"

"Guys! Guys! Shut the fuck up," I barked, breaking off their superfluous cat fight. "Raphael, get into Room 2Y5. We've got work to do."

"Mmm, not anymore," a voice spoke from the corner of the containment center. In Raphael and Gabriel's bitch fest I hadn't notice Bela enter the unit.

Bela was one of Sam's employees. She was very good with a gun but very bad with authority. I never exactly understood how Sam dealt with her up there in special ops. She must have been a nightmare on kidnappings.

She stood in the corner of the room, wearing a black suit with an ice blue silk scarf around her neck and a pair of mid-level black heels. She clearly was not here to take Chuck away to surgery for me.

"Another New Ager already? This department is becoming as effective as maintenance. You know the lights in Hall Q are still inactive?" Bela complained in her unfortunate British accent that was as annoying as it was kind of hot. She walked towards me, closing the distance between us. Things had gotten a little awkward for her and me since we hooked up four months ago. She was always trying to make it seem like the dynamic between us had not changed when we had really just become antagonistic animals, teasing each other and taunting one another to attack.

"The only thing ineffective is your inability to catch up on news around here. Hall Q was quarantined after a diazomethane leak 4 days ago, sweetheart," I replied, approaching her until our bodies almost touched. For a split second, the anger in Bela's eyes was replaced by the sweet, sweet look of fear. I knew it. The dumbass probably walked right into it.

"Compounds of the diethyl ether used to slow a New Ager's cardiac muscle to decrease blood flow to the brain before treatment leaked last Monday," Gabriel quipped, clearly suppressing a smirk at the brief flash of fear in Bela's eyes. "That is a job that is a little bit out of maintenance's pay grade."

"How-How did it leak?" Bela asked. She took a step back from me as if to take back her personal space.

"That information is disclosed. Besides, it is not any of your business. In fact, I don't even think Sammy knows," I answered, closing the gap between us again. Admittedly, I was playing with her a little bit. Maybe if I could make her think that even just setting foot in there would kill her, she would stop acting like such a bitch when she had to come down into my unit. Of course she wouldn't die and, to tell you the truth, the leak was probably pretty well contained by then. But seeing fear in Bela Talbot's eyes was a rarity that should be treasured.

"Dean, I think you should consider sharing information like toxic gas leaks with the rest of the building!" Bela shouted, pushing me away.

"Holy shit, did you walk into Hall Q?!" squealed Raphael who had apparently decided to fall out of his drunken stupor. Raphael leaned against the metal chair in a deep laugh, his warm Miller dropping to the ground and breaking into pieces on the concrete.

"No!" Bela shouted, the fear returning into her eyes, her cheeks growing uncomfortably hot. Oh god, it was just too good.

"Shut the fuck up, you were fucking there! Dude, 5 grand right now that you fucking fall dead flat on your ugly-ass pretentious face before this pathetic New Ager in here does." Rapheal banged on the metal door where Chuck was contained. The deep dinging sound Raphael's fist made against the door only made Chuck shriek from inside the compartment. Muffled cries for help slipped into the containment center, causing Raphael to laugh harder.

"Oh yeah? Done." Bela shook Raphael's hand. Her all-too-familiar snarky smile crawled across her face as she did so.

"Okay, enough with this bullshit," I spat, realizing that-their fun and games put aside- this was our job and it sure as hell was not being done. "Did you need anything Bela, or did you just come down to be a bitch as always?"

"Oh, don't jump to the punch line, Dean. I was just getting to that part." Bela released Raphael's hand to grab the standard black 9mm from her inside pocket of her suit jacket. She stormed right past the three of us to the containment compartment. Before I realized what she was up to, she dialed the four digit passcode into the compartment and flung open the door to Chuck's holding block.

"What the fuck are you—"

_BANG_

I couldn't finish my sentence before Bela had put a bullet through Chuck's skull. The man didn't even flinch as he sunk to his knees. His head slumped below his shoulders, the blood trickling down his plaid shirt and on to the concrete where it pooled at his feet.

The loud rip of the bullet through the barrel of Bela's glock silenced the room. Even Raphael's laugh had subsided and grown quiet. Though, I am guessing it was only because he realized he had just lost the bet. Bela shoved the gun back into her jacket pocket before she strutted past the three of us, leaving Chuck's limp body stone against the concrete.

"You owe me five grand," she purred in her obnoxious accent as she strolled past Raphael out of the containment center.

"Yeah, fuck you," Rapheal shouted back. I doubt Bela could hear him now.

Gabriel walked out into the hall where he picked up the landline telephone on the wall. I couldn't read the expression on his face, but I could guess that part of him was relieved that he didn't have to perform an operation today. He dialed the extension to the cleanup crew as we called them. These poor guys spent most of their time sitting around dark rooms playing black jack or some shit until they were called to clean up whatever mess we had made during surgery.

The surgical procedures Gabriel and I carried out under the prestigious guise of the "Men of Letters" was as horrid as it was satisfying. On one hand, there is nothing glamourous—or moral, for that matter—with pumping some sucker full of harmful chemicals, drilling into their grapefruit, and placing a network of brain-computer interfaces into their cranium, pre-programmed with whatever settings we needed this time to change a stock price, crash a company, or, sometimes, crash the market. However, on the other hand, there was a certain high in playing God. America was a mad-house made up of a whole bunch of suppressed sheep and a few selfish megalomaniacs who actually thought they held substantial power in this world. If they only knew the magic Charlie Bradbury played with the neural implants in their brains when we needed them.

A few men from the cleanup department clad in yellow hazmat suits entered the containment center. I laughed under my breath. They had acquired the hazmat suits three years ago after a gas leak in the operation unit and refused to take them off when they were around me. It didn't matter if all they were doing was dragging away a corpse. I may have had the tendency to go a little too crazy on the toxic chemicals…

"Dean-o!" shouted Gabriel from the landline. "Phone call." He held the phone out to me. I pressed the outdated wired telephone to my ear. "Yep," I spoke into the receiver.

"Hey, Dean. You're still a go for the engineers repairing the San Fran Bridge on Tuesday, right?" asked my brother in a rough, groggy voice. The kid clearly got no sleep again.

"As far as I know, yeah." The systemization of twelve of America's finest engineers on Tuesday was Step Two in our biggest set-up in over four years. The end game was a soaring stock price for Sandover Bridge &amp; Iron inc. The financial department and I had already swallowed up 40% of the company's stock through our personal accounts and through the systemization of several of Sandover's biggest shareholders. It was an old trick, really. Sam's team would round up the biggest shareholders in the company and bring them to Gabriel and I. From there we would implant passcodes and account locations into their short-term memories so when the time came to shove their stock earnings into a bank vault, the Men of Letters had all of the account information needed to steal the money away from the sons of bitches.

Step Two involved kidnapping a slew of the engineers working on the San Francisco Bridge repairs scheduled two weeks from now. The brain-computer interfaces in their skulls would be programmed to screw with the part of the brain that registered the complex equations and algorithms they devised to perform adequate repairs on one of America's most iconic works of engineering. The implants would essentially make them as hopeless as apathetic middle school kids in remedial algebra. If all worked as planned, the repairs on the bridge would be inadequate and the bridge's structure would collapse within a few weeks of the repairs. We had similar procedures planned for engineers working on The George Washington Bridge in New York, as well as the Walt Whitman Bridge in Philadelphia.

In the meantime, we needed to secure a limited monopoly on the market for Sandover. Luckily, due to our brainwashing of President Bush and 2/3rds of congress a decade ago (quite the operation, let me tell you…), America was completely protectionist. Globalization made our work too complex, you see. So now no goods that were not produced and sold in America could be used in America. Therefore, if several bridges collapsed around the same time period, cities were going to need some heavy-duty surveyors, consultants, and iron-producers in the states. There were only two companies left that could handle such a feat: Sandover Bridge and Iron Inc. and Dick Roman Enterprises.

Step Three required the merger of Dick Roman Enterprises with Sucrocorp, an agricultural corporation that had hit it big in corn syrup. It seemed like an unusual switch, what, with Roman Enterprises supplying some of the most high quality supplies and consultancy to urban development. However, once we were through with Naomi, the CEO of Sucrocorp, and Dick Roman, the CEO of Roman Enterprises, Dick wouldn't think twice before signing his company away to Naomi.

Then, we had nothing else left to do but let the market take its course. Zachariah, CEO of Sandover, would pounce on the surely fatal accidents across the country. With Roman Enterprises out of the way, Sandover would be the only reasonable choice left equipped to clean up such a mess. They would hit it big with the extra business, consumers would love them for helping out in their great time of need, the citys' mayors would praise the company's name, and their stock price would rise, if all went well, by more than 50% of that year's estimates. The 40% of stock we had under our control would make us millions and our operation would carry on as normal, greased with a nice score from Wall Street.

This job was too fucking easy.

"Okay, thanks," said Sam.  
"Wait, Sam!" I caught him before he hung up on me. "Why did you send Bela down here to blast away my New Ager?"  
There was silence on the other end of the phone.

"Dean, it wasn't my order."

I could feel my muscles clench at the realization that the special operations unit didn't call in the kill. And if it wasn't Sammy, there was only one other man in this entire organization that had the authority to make that kind of order.

**_20 miles outside of Topeka, Kansas, Winter 1995_**

"Suck it up, kid. This rat was a threat to everything our parents built!" commanded my childhood enemy. His breath spilled hot down my neck where the harsh winter air stung the exposed skin. "He wasn't even your fucking friend!"

"Yeah well neither are you!" I screamed back at him. He was taller than me by almost a foot and I had to stand on my tip-toes just to attempt to meet his eyes.

I was ten years old when I was forced to bury Kevin Tran in that corn field outside of Topeka, Kansas. Escorting me on the job was my virulent neighbor whom I had grown to hate over the last few days. At sixteen years old, the boy was more than a playground bully. There was something inside of him that wasn't quite right, just like his mother, Lilith Macleod. Unfortunately Lilith and my old man were good friends. I was convinced that after my mother died when I was four that they were in some kind of disgusting secret relationship. The two grew up together, you see, so there was no escaping her son, no matter how many times I screamed to my dad that I couldn't spend my time with any creep whose prized possession was a journal filled with intricate details on ways to dissect the human brain.

"You didn't know him," I pleaded, tears forming around the lids of my eyes as Lilith's son picked up the shovel. To be frank, I didn't know Kevin either, but he always seemed like a nice kid. He was quiet in school. It wasn't his fault he knew too much.

"Don't be such a dumbass, Dean! He's just another rat. How could he know every detail about your life—more than even you knew—and say that he doesn't belong in a place where nobody can hear him spill his pathetic guts?"

I flung my fist forward at him, trying to reach for his jaw. But I was too weak, my arms were too short, and I was too young to be messing with the prized grandson of Fergus "Crowley" MacLeod. He grabbed my arm with little effort before it made contact with his body. He twisted it around, shattering the bones in my left arm as he shoved my body against the frozen ground. Face down on the dead field of corn, I felt the back of the shovel scrape gently across my scalp, through the strands of my short brown hair.

"Bury him or you'll be buried with him."

Sam's firm grasp on my shoulder brought me back to where I was. The containment center had grown quiet. Gabriel was nowhere to be found and the cleaning crew had erased all evidence that Chuck was ever in the place. All the blood staining the floor of the compartment had disappeared as if it had been a mirage.

I turned to meet eyes with my brother. God, the kid really hadn't gotten any sleep. Hidden behind his chestnut bed-head hair were two hazel eyes, bloodshot and wild with a desperate need for rest.

"Sammy…" I sighed with disapproval.

"Dean, it's nothing. What does this mean?"

I knew Sam would be as concerned as I was. If the big man upstairs was involved, then something big was about to go down. I wasn't sure if I cared to know what it was.

I grabbed my cell phone from my pocket. Sam's face tightened, worry flooding through his bloodshot stare.

"Don't give him what he wants."

"I don't like him either, but we're the best working cogs in this machine. He's always had our best interest in mind because we're of best interest to him. He clearly needs me to do something and I'm not going to be the one to break this man's machine."

I looked into my contacts to find his extension. I very rarely called the leader of the Men of Letters. I rarely had anything to say. So it was no surprise that my stomach tightened as I came to his name in my contacts.

Michael MacLeod.

What a dick.

I hit dial on my phone before I could second guess myself.

"Dean," cooed a deep voice on the other end of the line.

"You have my attention, Michael."

I could imagine the prick now sitting at his mahogany desk in the financial analytics department with his expensive Italian loafers propped up on top of his spreadsheets and statistical analyses. He would be leaning back in his black arm chair, his black short hair slicked back, not a single hair out of place.

A soft chuckle entered my ear. "Not my best, I admit. Maybe a little too abrasive, but, a bullet through that New Ager's skull was inevitable."

I clenched my fist to keep my anger from boiling over. I needed to stay professional. I looked over at Sam who was glaring at me. He could obviously hear Michael through the phone, waiting as impatiently as I was to find out what exactly it was he wanted from me.

"What do you need?" I asked curtly.

There was a long pause on the other line. For a second I thought he didn't hear me until I finally heard a small sigh escape Michael's lips.

"_He _knows."

I hung up the phone before Michael could elaborate. I didn't need to hear anymore. I placed the edge of it to my temple as I struggled to hold back the fear beginning to form inside me.

"Who knows, Dean?" Sam whispered to me. I met his exhausted eyes, anxiety distorting the angles of his face.

"Castiel."


End file.
